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Democracy fatigue

Arjun Appadurai

The central question of our times is whether we are witnessing the worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some sort of populist authoritarianism. Strong signs of this trend are to be found in Trump's America, Putin's Russia, Modi's India and Erdogan's Turkey. In addition, we have numerous examples of already existing authoritarian governments (Orbán in Hungary, Duda in Poland) and major aspirants to authoritarian right-wing rule in France, Austria and other European Union countries. The total population of these countries is almost a third of the total population of the world. There has been growing alarm about this global shift to the right but we have relatively few good explanations for it. In this essay, I offer an explanation and a European approach to building an alternative.

Leaders and followers

We need to rethink the relationship between leaders and followers in the new populisms that surround us. Our traditional habits of analysis lead us to imagine that major social trends in the political sphere have to do with such things as charisma, propaganda, ideology and other factors, all of which presume a strong connection between leaders and followers. Today, leaders and followers do of course connect but this connection is based on an accidental and partial overlap between the ambitions, visions and strategies of leaders and the fears, wounds and angers of their followers. The leaders who have risen in the new populist movements are typically xenophobic, patriarchal and authoritarian in their styles. Their followers may share some of these tendencies but they are also fearful, angry, and resentful of what their societies have done for and to them. These profiles do of course meet, especially in elections (however rigged or managed they may be). But this meeting place is not easy to understand. Why did some Muslims in India and the United States vote for Modi and Trump? Why do some women in the United States adore Trump? Why do groups from the former German Democratic Republic now vote for right-wing politicians? Addressing these puzzles requires us to think about leaders and followers in the new populisms somewhat independently of one another.

The message from above

The new populist leaders recognize that they aspire to national leadership in an era in which national sovereignty is in crisis. The most striking symptom of this crisis of sovereignty is that no modern nation-state controls what could be called its national economy. This is equally a problem for the richest and poorest of nations. The US economy is substantially in Chinese hands, the Chinese depend crucially on raw materials from Africa and Latin America as well as other parts of Asia, everyone depends to some extent on Middle Eastern oil, and virtually all modern nation-states depend on sophisticated armaments from a small number of wealthy countries. Economic sovereignty, as a basis for national sovereignty, was always a dubious principle. Today, it is increasingly irrelevant.

In the absence of any national economy that modern states can claim to protect and develop, it is no surprise that there has been a worldwide tendency in effective states and in many aspiring populist movements to perform national sovereignty by turning towards cultural majoritarianism, ethno-nationalism and the stifling of internal intellectual and cultural dissent. In other words, the loss of economic sovereignty everywhere produces a shift towards emphasizing cultural sovereignty. This turn towards culture as the site of national sovereignty appears in many forms.

Take Russia in the hands of Vladimir Putin. In December 2014, Putin signed a decree setting up a state cultural policy for Russia centred on the maxim 'Russia is not Europe'. Reflecting an explicit hostility to the cultural West and to European multiculturalism, which Putin has characterized as 'neutered and barren'1 - both loaded sexual expressions - it enlists Russian masculinity as a political force. This rhetoric is an explicit call to return to traditional Russian values and is anchored on a deep history of Slavophile sentiment and Russophile cultural politics. The immediate context for this document was the battle over the future of Ukraine, and it underlay the cancellation of concerts by Russian anti-Kremlin rock musician Andrey Makarevich, while reflecting the longer-term harassment of the musical group Pussy Riot. The policy calls for a 'unified cultural space' throughout Russia and makes it clear that Russian cultural uniqueness and uniformity are crucial tools to be used against cultural minorities at home and political enemies abroad.

Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also turned culture into a theatre of sovereignty. The main vehicle of his strategy is to advocate a return to Ottoman traditions, language forms and imperial grandeur (an ideology that his critics have dubbed 'neo-Ottomanism'). This vision of Turkey also encodes its global ambitions, its resistance to Russian interventions in the Middle East, and acts as a counterweight to the country's aspiration to join the European Union. This neo-Ottoman posture is a key part of Erdogan's endeavour to marginalize and replace the secular nationalism of Kemal Atatürk, the icon of modern Turkey, with a more religious and imperial style of rule. The country has also witnessed considerable censorship of art and cultural institutions alongside direct repression of popular political dissent, as in Gezi Park in 2013.

In many ways, Narendra Modi, the right-wing ideologue who now enjoys the prime ministership of India, offers the best example of how the new authoritarian leaders produce and maintain a populist strategy. Modi has a long career as a party worker and activist for the Hindu Right in India. He served as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, and was implicated in the state-wide genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, after some Muslims attacked a train carrying Hindu pilgrims through the state. Many progressive Indians still believe that Modi actively orchestrated this genocide, but he has managed to overcome many judicial and civil condemnations and won the campaign to become prime minister of India in 2014. He is an open advocate of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) as the governing ideology of India and, like many of the current crop of authoritarian populists across the world, combines extreme cultural nationalism with markedly neoliberal policies and projects. Under his now almost three-year-old leadership, there has been an unprecedented number of assaults on sexual, religious, cultural and artistic freedoms in India, anchored in a systematic dismantling of the secular and socialist heritage of Jawaharlal Nehru and the non-violent vision of Mahatma Gandhi. Under Modi, war with Pakistan is always a heartbeat away, India's Muslims are living in growing fear, and Dalits (the lowest castes, previously 'Untouchable') are brazenly attacked and humiliated every day. Modi has brought together the lexicon of ethnic purity with the discourse of cleanliness and sanitation. Indian cultural images abroad, highlighting its combination of digital modernity and Hindu authenticity, and Hindu domination at home are the cornerstones of Indian sovereignty.

And so it is with our latest nightmare, the victory of Donald Trump in the US elections of 8 November 2016. This event is still very recent, so even hindsight is in poor supply. But Trump has already begun to act on his election plans with his cabinet appointments and policy utterances since his election. We cannot expect his victory to moderate his style. Trump's message, which combines misogyny, racism, xenophobia and megalomania on a scale unprecedented in recent history, is centred on two extreme messages, one implicit and one explicit. The explicit message is his aim to 'Make America Great Again', by beefing up foreign military options for the United States, renegotiating various trade deals that he believes have diminished American wealth and prestige, unshackling US businesses from various tax and environmental constraints, and, above all, by making good on his promises to 'register' all Muslims in the US, deport all illegals, tighten up American borders and massively increase immigration controls. The implicit message is racist and racial, and speaks to those white Americans who feel they have lost their imagined dominance in American politics and economy to blacks, Latinos and migrants of every type. Trump's biggest rhetorical success is to put the Greeks of 'whiteness' into the Trojan horse of every one of his messages about 'American' greatness, so that 'making America great again' becomes the public way of promising that whites in America will be great again. For the first time, a message about America's power in the world has become a dog-whistle for making whites the ruling class of and in the US again. The message about the salvation of the American economy has been transformed into a message about saving the white race.

This, then, is what the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms have in common: the recognition that none of them can truly control their national economies, which are hostages to foreign investors, global agreements, transnational finance, mobile labour and capital in general. All of them promise national cultural purification as a route to global political power. All of them are friendly to neoliberal capitalism, with their own versions of how to make it work for...